USA

ByCompiled from wire service reports by Ross AtkinJune 6, 2005

The Mars rover Opportunity resumed rolling freely across the Martian surface Saturday after scientists freed the robotic explorer from a sand dune where it had been mired for nearly five weeks, NASA officials said. Opportunity's wheels became stuck while trying to drive over a foot-high sand dune. Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, have been exploring opposite sides of Mars since landing in January 2004. Both rovers have long outlasted their primary, three-month missions.

Relatives in Alsip, Ill., Saturday reburied Emmett Till, the black teenager lynched in Mississippi 50 years ago, following an autopsy that might yield clues to an unsolved murder that helped spark the US civil rights movement. The FBI exhumed Till's body in a bid to shed light on a crime that symbolized the raw history of race relations in America. Autopsy results were sent from the Cook County Medical Examiner in Illinois to prosecutors in Greenville, Miss., where charges could be brought.

The White House sought over the weekend to minimize damage from new revelations about US personnel mishandling the Koran at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison, accusing a few people of violating policy and the media of blowing "isolated incidents" out of proportion. The US military Friday released details about five cases in which the Islamic holy book was kicked, stepped on, and wetted.

Education Department figures show that overall computer use among the youngest learners is becoming more common. Some 23 percent of children in nursery school - kids age 3, 4, or 5 - have gone online, according to the department, and by kindergarten, 32 percent have used the Internet, typically under adult supervision.

Authorities staged an elaborate antiterrorism drill Saturday at Boston's Logan International Airport, responding to a simulated hijacking reminiscent of the December 2001 plot to detonate a shoe bomb aboard a trans-Atlantic flight. Fighter jets intercepted the airliner over the Atlantic and forced it to land at Logan. "Operation Atlas," which cost roughly $700,000 and brought together about 50 federal, state, and local agencies, was billed as the first training drill involving a real airborne intercept of a commercial airliner.